Lexical Representations: Syntax-Semantics interface and World Knowledge

One of the major problems in every attempt at real text understanding has been that of controlling the inferences associated with the interpretation process. In our opinion as well as in Partee's and Dahlgren’s opinion, separate semantic levels - lexical level, grammar and parser, pronominal and discourse level, temporal level - conspire to produce the global interpretation. Indeed, discourse analysis requires a highly flexible structure where each individual source of semantic knowledge contributes its own local inference which is then combined at a higher level. In this perspective, the representation of lexical semantics is just one of the many levels in which semantic interpretation is carried out incrementally. The whole process requires cooperation among separate semantic modules in order to produce a coherent inferential process. Such an approach makes the reasoning process both tractable and computationally efficient.